US as Adversary

Many posts have discussed foreign policy, war powers and the US military.

Mike Allen at Axios: 

Imagine a world where ties to the U.S. feel like a burden, not a benefit to free society."How America First Risks Becoming America Alone," an essay in this weekend's Wall Street Journal, says American allies — soured by President Trump's treatment — are "searching for alternatives to what increasingly feels like an abusive relationship."

• 📊 Positive views of the U.S. are declining worldwide, the essay notes:Brits who view the U.S. unfavorably doubled in the past two years to 64%. (YouGov)
• In Germany, 71% view the U.S. as an "adversary." (German polling firm Forsa)
• Across Europe, just 16% view the U.S. as an ally. (European Council on Foreign Relations)
• Nearly two-thirds of Canadians, Mexicans and Brazilians hold unfavorable views of the U.S., "and view their neighbor as a bigger threat than China."

Data: European Council on Foreign Relations. Chart: Axios Visuals

COVID Deaths

Alyssa Bilinski, Ezekiel J. Emanuel at JAMA:

The US has experienced more deaths from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) than any other country and has one of the highest cumulative per capita death rates.1,2 An unanswered question is to what extent high US mortality was driven by the early surge of cases prior to improvements in prevention and patient management vs a poor longer-term response.3 We compared US COVID-19 deaths and excess all-cause mortality in 2020 (vs 2015-2019) to that of 18 countries with diverse COVID-19 responses.

...

Compared with other countries, the US experienced high COVID-19–associated mortality and excess all-cause mortality into September 2020. After the first peak in early spring, US death rates from COVID-19 and from all causes remained higher than even countries with high COVID-19 mortality. This may have been a result of several factors, including weak public health infrastructure and a decentralized, inconsistent US response to the pandemic.4,5

Limitations of this analysis include differences in mortality risk: the US population is younger but has more comorbidities compared with the other countries.6 In addition, since late August death rates have increased in several countries, and how mortality will compare with the US throughout fall remains unknown.

According to data from Johns Hopkins, the US compares poorly with other democracies that have federal systems.  Deaths per 100,000 population:

• United States ..... 66.29
• Canada.................26.23
• Germany..............11.72
• Australia..............03.62 

Americans Give Higher COVID-19 Marks to Germany and South Korea than to USA

From Pew:

With stunning speed, the COVID-19 pandemic has swept across borders, claiming victims and shutting down economies in nations across the globe. The crisis has generated a variety of policy responses from governments, with varying degrees of success. When asked how well different countries have responded to the outbreak, Americans give high marks to South Korea and Germany. In contrast, most believe China – where the pandemic is believed to have originated – has done an only fair or poor job.

Most are also critical of Italy’s response, while the public is divided over how well the United Kingdom has dealt with COVID-19. Regarding their own country’s reaction, Americans are divided along partisan lines. Overall, 47% of adults say the United States has done a good or excellent job of handling the outbreak, but just 27% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents hold that view, compared with 71% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.

Americans largely agree the U.S. should look beyond its borders for ideas to combat the coronavirus. Nearly half (46%) say the U.S. can learn a great deal from other countries about ways to slow the spread of the virus, while another 38% say it can learn a fair amount. Few say there is not too much (13%) or nothing at all (3%) the U.S. can learn from other countries.

Knowing About the Holocaust

From Pew:

Most U.S. adults know what the Holocaust was and approximately when it happened, but fewer than half can correctly answer multiple-choice questions about the number of Jews who were murdered or the way Adolf Hitler came to power, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

When asked to describe in their own words what the Holocaust was, more than eight-in-ten Americans mention the attempted annihilation of the Jewish people or other related topics, such as concentration or death camps, Hitler, or the Nazis. Seven-in-ten know that the Holocaust happened between 1930 and 1950. And close to two-thirds know that Nazi-created ghettos were parts of a city or town where Jews were forced to live.

Fewer than half of Americans (43%), however, know that Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany through a democratic political process. And a similar share (45%) know that approximately 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Nearly three-in-ten Americans say they are not sure how many Jews died during the Holocaust, while one-in-ten overestimate the death toll, and 15% say that 3 million or fewer Jews were killed.

Bush 41 and the End of the Cold War

James A. Baker III at The Washington Post:

Thirty years ago, on Nov. 9, 1989, as crowds of East and West Germans were tearing down the wall that symbolized division and totalitarianism, I was fortunate to watch firsthand as President George H.W. Bush eschewed high rhetoric in favor of clear-eyed statecraft.
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He had developed strong relations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President Francois Mitterrand. Each of them trusted the president as a leader who kept his word. They also recognized that Bush would search for pragmatic solutions in an effort to ease their concerns rather than ignore them. As a result, less than a year after the wall fell — on Oct. 3, 1990 — Germany became a single nation again.

Bush’s nimble diplomacy was instrumental in concluding the Cold War with a whimper rather than the nuclear bang I had feared for most of my adult life. And it cleared the way for democracy and freedom to spread.

In the end, no one individual was responsible for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Bush, in many ways, followed in the path of every American president since Truman in his commitment to a free and undivided Europe. The actions of Gorbachev and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl were historic. And, above all, the enduring spirit of the citizens of the captive states finally tipped the scales toward freedom.

But Bush’s role was indispensable. Because of his adroit foreign policy during that time of global transition, he is routinely remembered as one of our nation’s most effective leaders and the very best one-term president ever.

It is a model that all American presidents should follow.

The Forty-Eighters

At UCLA. Christian Dippel† Stephan Heblich have a paper titled "Leadership in Social Networks:

Evidence from the Forty-Eighters in the Civil War."  The abstract:

A growing theoretical literature emphasizes that prominent individuals (‘leaders’) can be instrumental in changing behaviors and beliefs inside social networks, and  consequently play an important role in shaping the path of history. We test this assertion in the context of the U.S. Civil War. Our analysis is organized around a natural experiment: leaders of the failed German revolution of 1848-49 were expelled to the U.S., and became important anti-slavery campaigners who helped mobilize Union Army  volunteers. We find that towns where Forty-Eighters settled in the 1850s increased their enlistments by ten men per hundred adult males over the course of the war, or roughly eighty percent. The Forty-Eighters’ influence worked at least in part through the local press and local social clubs. In the army, Forty-Eighter officers reduced their companies’ desertion rate. In the long run, towns where Forty-Eighters settled were more likely to form a local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

From the paper:

German-Americans had traditionally supported the Democratic Party, and were additionally put off the Republican Party when after 1857 it absorbed large numbers of anti-immigrant ‘Know-Nothings’.To counteract this, the Forty-Eighters demanded a formal repudiation of nativism by the Republican Party at the 1860 Chicago convention; effectively ”forcing the party to choose between Eastern nativists and the German vote in the West” (Wittke, 1973, 213). It is not our aim to weight in on whether the Forty-Eighters’ demands were the main reason this formal repudiation came to pass, but pass it did, and became known as the ”Dutch plank” in the Republican Party platform (Baron, 2012, 5).26 And as a result of the Dutch plank, many German-American votes swung Republican, whilst the nativists “were absorbed into a party which made no concessions to them” (Foner, 1970, 258).27

Bush's Leadership

Former Secretary of State James A. Baker eulogizes his old friend George H.W. Bush:

He was not considered a skilled speaker, but his deeds were quite eloquent. And he demonstrated their eloquence by carving them into the hard granite of history. They expressed his moral character, and they reflected his decency, his boundless kindness and consideration of others, his determination always to do the right thing, and always to do that to the very best of his ability. They testify to a life nobly lived. He possessed the classic virtues of our civilization and of his faith. The same virtues that express what is really best about this country. The same ideals were known to and shared by our founding fathers. George Bush was temperate in thought, in word, and in deed. He considered his choices and then he chose wisely.

The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, less than one year into his presidency. It was a remarkable triumph for American foreign policy. As joyous east and west Germans danced on the remains of that hated wall, George Bush could have joined them metaphorically, and claimed victory for the west, for America, and frankly, for himself.

But he did not. He knew better. He understood that humility toward and not humiliation of a fallen adversary was the very best path to peace and reconciliation, and so he was able to unify Germany as a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, not withstanding the initial reservations of France, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union.

Thus, the Cold War ended, not with a bang but with the sound of a halliard rattling through a pulley over the Kremlin on a cool night in December 1991 as the flag of the Soviet Union was lowered for the very last time. Need we ask about George Bush's courage? During World War II, he risked his life in defense of something greater than himself. Decades later, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and began to brutalize Kuwaitis, George Bush never wavered.

Peggy Noonan at WSJ:

Here’s a theory: Bush’s achievement wasn’t seen for what it was, in part because America in those days was still going forward in the world with its old mystique. Its ultimate grace and constructiveness were a given. It had gallantly saved its friends in the First World War, and again in the Second; it had led the West’s resistance to communism. It was expected to do good.

Having won the war, of course it would win the peace. It seemed unremarkable that George Bush, and Brent Scowcroft, and a host of others did just that.

Bush was the last president to serve under—and add to—that American mystique. It has dissipated in the past few decades through pratfalls, errors and carelessness, with unwon wars and the economic crisis of 2008. The great foreign-affairs challenge now is to go forward in the world successfully while knowing the mystique has been lessened, and doing everything possible to win it back.

Leaders and Children

Every president since bachelor James Buchanan has had children. (Harding never acknowledged having children, but he had at least one out of wedlock.) In fact, two of John Tyler's grandchildren are alive today.

The contrast with European leaders is notable, as Ted Malloch suggests at Intellectual Takeout:

Emmanuel Macron, the newly elected French president, has no children; German chancellor Angela Merkel has no children.

British prime minister, Theresa May has no children; Italian prime minister Paolo Gentiloni has no children; Holland’s prime minister, Mark Rutte, Sweden’s Stefan Löfven, Luxembourg’s Xavier Bettel, and Scotland’s, first minster Nicola Sturgeon — all have no children.

The list goes on… Latvia’s childless president is Raimonds Vējonis, Lithuania’s childless president is Dalia Grybauskaitė, and Romania’s childless president is Klaus Werner Iohannis. And, Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission too, has no children and is family-less.

So to put it rather bluntly: a grossly disproportionate number of the people making serious decisions about Europe’s future have no direct personal sibling, child or grandchildren’s interests at stake in that future. They are not part of a family and have come to see all their attention focused on one dominant and all-powerful social unit to which they pay obeisance and give their complete and devoted attention: The State.

The demographics look problematic. Among native Europeans, the birthrate is currently between 0.2 and 1.1. Europe is not replicating itself and will, if trends are extrapolated—cease to exist.

Bilateral Trump

At NYT Mark Landler writes that Trump has had a difficult relationship with Angela Merkel.  In an early phone call, she had to explain Ukraine to him, which annoyed White House officials.

Later, he told Ms. Merkel that he wanted to negotiate a new bilateral trade agreement with Germany. The problem with this idea was that Germany, as a member of the European Union, could not negotiate its own agreement with the United States 

Rather than exposing Mr. Trump’s ignorance, Ms. Merkel said the United States could, of course, negotiate a bilateral agreement, but that it would have to be with Germany and the other 27 members of the union because Brussels conducted such negotiations on behalf of its members 

“So it could be bilateral?” Mr. Trump asked Ms. Merkel, according to several people in the room. The chancellor nodded 

“That’s great,” Mr. Trump replied before turning to his commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, and telling him, “Wilbur, we’ll negotiate a bilateral trade deal with Europe. 

Afterward, German officials expressed relief among themselves that Ms. Merkel had managed to get through the exchange without embarrassing the president or appearing to lecture him. Some White House officials, however, said they found the episode humiliating.

Don't Be a Sucker

In the wake of Charlottesville, it is worth looking at an old movie. Don't Be a Sucker! is a short that the War Department made in 1943 and re-released in 1947.

The Leader of the Free World: Angela Merkel

Pew reports:

As leaders from 20 of the world’s largest economies prepare to meet in Germany this week for the Group of Twenty (G2o) summit, residents in most member countries have more confidence in the summit’s host – German Chancellor Angela Merkel – than in U.S. President Donald Trump to do the right thing in world affairs, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

Across the majority of the G20 nations, people prefer Merkel to Trump on world affairs, according to the survey, which examines attitudes in 37 nations, including in 17 of the 19 members of the G20 (the organization also includes a representative of the European Union). In only two of the G20 countries surveyed – India and Russia – do residents have substantially more confidence in Trump than in Merkel when it comes to world affairs.

Trump Is Undermining America's International Standing

Der Spiegel:

Germany must stand up in opposition to the 45th president of the United States and his government. That's difficult enough already for two reasons: Because it is from the Americans that we obtained our liberal democracy in the first place; and because it is unclear how the brute and choleric man on the other side will react to diplomatic pressure. The fact that opposition to the American government can only succeed when mounted together with Asian and African partners -- and no doubt with our partners in Europe, with the EU -- doesn't make the situation any easier.

So far, Germany has viewed its leadership role -- at least the leadership understanding of Chancellor Angela Merkel and Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble -- as one that is by all means in opposition to the interests of other European countries. Whether Schäuble's austerity policies or Merkel's migration policies, it all happened without much co-coordination and with considerable force. It is thus somewhat ironical that it is Germany, the country that is politically and economically dominant in Europe, that will now have to fill in many of the gaps created by America's withdrawal from the old world order, the one referred to by former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer as "Pax Americana." At the same time, Germany must build an alliance against Donald Trump, because it otherwise won't take shape. It is, however, absolutely necessary.

It is literally painful to write this sentence, but the president of the United States is a pathological liar. The president of the U.S. is a racist (it also hurts to write this). He is attempting a coup from the top; he wants to establish an illiberal democracy, or worse; he wants to undermine the balance of power. He fired an acting attorney general who held a differing opinion from his own and accused her of "betrayal." This is the vocabulary used by Nero, the emperor and destroyer of Rome. It is the way tyrants think.

Patrick Maguire reports at The Guardian:

Almost two-thirds of the British public believe Donald Trump is a threat to international stability and a clear majority believe he will be a bad president, according to an Opinium/Observer poll conducted during his tumultuous second week in office.

The study reveals Britons have an overwhelmingly negative view of the divisive US president, who in the fortnight since his inauguration has signed a string of executive orders imposing draconian immigration measures, professed to backing torture and rowed publicly with the leaders of Mexico, Iran and Australia. In addition to the 64% who believe he represents a threat to international stability, the words most commonly associated by Britons with the divisive US president are dangerous (50%), unstable (39%), and bigot (35%). A further 56% believe he is untrustworthy.

It also reveals that more than four in 10 people (44%) believe Trump will be an awful president, with a further one in ten believing he will be below average. A mere 6% believe Trump will be a great president.

Stephen Castle reports at The New York Times:

Invited just days after his inauguration to make a state visit to Britain, President Trump is expected to travel to London this year to meet Queen Elizabeth II amid all the pomp and ceremony the British can muster.

But on Monday it seemed that Mr. Trump may have to do without one of the frequent trappings of such a visit — an invitation to address Parliament — after the speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, publicly opposed such an appearance, citing his “opposition to racism and sexism.”

The comments will embarrass both the British and American governments and add to the controversy over a planned state visit that has attracted opposition in Britain, where more than 1.8 million people have signed a petition urging the government to cancel Mr. Trump’s trip.

Bercow's statement:

What I will say is this. An address by a foreign leader to both House of Parliament is not an automatic right. It is an earned honour. Moreover, there are many precedents for state visits to take place to our country which do not include an address to both Houses of Parliament. That’s the first point.

In relation to Westminster Hall, there are three key holder to Westminster Hall: the speaker of the House of Commons, the speaker of the House of Lords and the lord great chamberlain. Ordinarily we are able to work by consensus and the hall would be used for a purpose such as an address or another purpose by agreement of the three key holders.

I must say to the honourable gentleman, to all who signed his early day motion and to others with strong views about this matter on either side of the argument, that before the imposition of the migrant ban I would myself have been strongly opposed to an address by President Trump in Westminster Hall. After the imposition of the migrant ban by President Trump I am even more strongly opposed to an address by President Trump in Westminster Hall.

So far as the Royal Gallery is concerned, again I operate on advice, I do not perhaps have as strong a say in that matter. It is in a different part of the building [ie, in the House of Lords, not the Commons], although customarily an invitation to a visiting leader to deliver an address there would be issued in the names of the two speakers. I would not wish to issue an invitation to President Trump to speak in the Royal Gallery.

And I concluded by saying to the honourable gentleman this. We value our relationshjip with the United States. If a state visit takes place, that is way beyond beyond and above the pay grade of the Speaker.

However, as far as this place [the House of Commons] is concerned, I feel very strongly that our opposition to racism and to sexism and our support for equality before the law and an independent judiciary are hugely important considerations in the House of Commons.